What’s New: February 2014

February has been filled with updates for the entire Office family. Two services have been renamed and enhanced: Office Web Apps is now Office Online; and SkyDrive Pro is now OneDrive for Business. This has also been a big month for security and compliance related updates with improvements to authentication for Office 365 and Yammer, anti-spam and anti-malware enhancements, new email encryption options with S/MIME and Office 365 Message encryption, and new Data Loss Prevention features. Power BI for Office 365 has exited preview and is now ready for all organizations to start visualizing their data. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see January’s What’s New.

Multi-factor Authentication – Now any users can be required to provide a second level of verification when logging into Office 365. Users can opt to receive a call, SMS, or use a mobile app to verify their identity. Multi-factor authentication adds an additional level of security to prevent unauthorized access to documents and email.

S/MIME encryption now supported – S/MIME standard now supported in Exchange Online across Outlook, OWA, and EAS so that organizations can send and receive S/MIME encrypted and digitally signed email from any compliant device.

Data loss prevention capabilities extended – Two new capabilities help organizations protect sensitive information. First, document fingerprinting lets organizations match and apply polices to documents derived from the same template. Second, Policy Tips are added to OWA so that you can see compliance policies related to your mail before it is sent.

New start page in the Exchange Admin Center – A new dashboard view provides direct links to the most common administrator tasks and speeds up admin page performance.

OneDrive for Business for iOS – SkyDrive Pro is now OneDrive for Business. The iOS app has been updated to OneDrive for Business and enabled for authenticating with certain SharePoint Server 2013 configurations.

Power BI now generally available – Now available as an add-on service for Office 365 customers or standalone. Power BI for Office 365 is a new service that enables you to search and access data from both internal and external sources, do natural language queries on that data, automatically refresh data, and create and share interactive dashboards.

Lync 2013 desktop client updates – The update adds an on or off option for displaying pictures in the sender/receiver view, adds support for high-res displays with 200% scaling, and adds the ability to transfer files and pictures in a Persistent Chat room.

Lync Mobile update for Android – This update gives you the option to rejoin a meeting or call you recently left or potentially dropped from, and lets you pick up an IM conversation right from where you left it, even if from another device.

Simplified login to Yammer – When Yammer is enabled as the default social experience in Office 365 the service will automatically map Office 365 users to their Yammer accounts. This mean when users click Yammer from the navigation bar they will not to sign-in again.

Updated Yammer App for SharePoint – SharePoint site owners who have installed the Yammer App for SharePoint should install the latest update to ensure continued functionality with SharePoint Online. Yammer App for SharePoint brings Yammer conversations inline to into context of the team site.

Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide.

– Andy O’Donald @andyodonald

——————————————————————————–

*Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics.””